


Can't Go Home

by uncontrollablesnark (orphan_account)



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Post-breakup, So much angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-22
Updated: 2012-09-22
Packaged: 2017-11-14 19:31:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/518751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/uncontrollablesnark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt Meme Fill. "I just want to go home, but I can't. It doesn't exist any more." Steve has lost everything. The people he loved. His home. Tony. Steve's tired. He just wants to go home. </p>
<p>Post-breakup Steve/Tony angst, basically. I don't know how to summary any more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Can't Go Home

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fill for a prompt on the Avengers Kink Meme over at LiveJournal. This is the prompt: http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/10266.html?thread=22579482#t22579482
> 
> The fic itself turned out a bit different to what the original prompter wanted, so sorry for any disappointment caused, but this is the direction it started to take, and I just kind of went with it. Even if it's not what you wanted, I hope you like it a little. Apologies for being all Queen of Angst all over the place... I get the feeling that this was originally meant to be more hurt/comfort...whoops!
> 
> Recommended listening: 9 Crimes by Damien Rice.

When Steve turns up on Tony's doorstep, face flooded by the fluorescent awning light, Tony almost feels sorry for him, forlorn puppy that he is. He looks tired and wan, only barely-contained shreds of the confident leader he had once known and loved and looked up to.

 

The pair eye each other, both cautiously, both as though from a hundred feet away, though had they reached out their arms, they would have embraced.

 

"What do you want, Steve?"

 

Tony immediately regrets using the other man's first name. It brings a little light of hope into hopeless eyes, a light so familiar to Tony, and something he cannot bear to see again lest he crush it once more. It scares him; hope. Once, he would have confided that in Steve, who now stands so alien before him. Once, he would have, but now, he does not. Cannot. That saddens him more than he could ever say, but he has been learning not to feel, and after a life in training, he is improving. Or at least, these are the lies he tells himself at night.

  
It still hurts, what happened between them, and it doesn't matter that ultimately he was the one who ended it, because the pain is just as raw and just as present, and so immense that he loses himself in it and floats away a little, coming untethered. He will never love again. He feels it somewhere deep in the ache of his bones. He will never love again; Steve was the greatest, and the last.

 

Steve shuffles on his feet, feeling at once that he is himself before he became the Captain, back when he was scrawny and weedy; a wimpy asthmatic kid who spent his Saturday evenings accumulating bruises and being tossed in dumpsters. Perhaps nothing has changed, except that this cold, windy Saturday night on the unconscious streets of the city that does not sleep, the bruises mark his heart, and the dumpsters are metaphors. He has since learned to defend himself - against most everything but this, this raw, emotional pain of the soul. He looks at Tony, but the other man's face is closed off, unreadable, as it so often became... Before. He cannot bring himself to think of it. He does not know why he has come here, to this place, where the fault lines of pain cross; the epicentre of his agony. Tony.

 

The seconds already feel like hours, and he gathers himself to reply. He has always been honest, honest to a fault, and he cannot bring himself to break to lies now. "You, Tony. I just want you."

 

Tony's teeth grit together and he swallows, hard, hating the aching rawness at the back of his throat, and the way his heartbeat has quickened, the sweat at the base of his palms, the itch to reply "I want you too" and sink back into those strong arms that are his fortress against the world. Were. Were his fortress against the world. The present rushes up against him, and he opens his mouth.

 

"I told you not to come here."

 

Steve looks mournfully at him. "How could I have not? I loved you, Tony - I still love you. I need -"

 

Tony cuts him off, staring somewhere over his shoulder. "I need you to leave," he says firmly, but it is quiet, so much fainter than his usual self, the merest ghost of it.

 

Steve closes his mouth abruptly, pressing his lips together as though he can stem the hurt as easily as the words.

 

"Do you not care at all?" Steve asks, seeking Tony's eyes. Tony continues to look away, fiddling intently with the brickwork, avoiding Steve's eyes and question.

 

"Go home, Steve," he says quietly, and for a moment there is silence.

 

"I can't." The words break unevenly on Steve's tongue, rasping out in a half-whisper, and Tony looks up involuntarily, stunned, perhaps. "I can't go home." Steve's voice cracks, and Tony isn't sure if it's the pre-dawn light, or if that's the shine of tears - real tears - glistening in Steve's eyes.

 

Steve leaves him no time to answer. "I can't go home, Tony. I can never go home. Home doesn't exist any more. And every day, I wake up and leave a place I just can't love, and I go to work and I do my best, and every day, at the end of the day - hell - all day, I want to go home. But home doesn't exist. All the people I loved are gone, dead, or old and demented. They don't remember me. The place where I lived was bulldozed six years ago, to make way for some fancy concrete-and-glass monstrosity that blocks the face of the sun. I don't have a home, Tony, not any more. I lost them all - Bucky and Howard and Peggy and everyone who ever meant a thing to me." He is actually crying now, silent tears, small, leaving tiny trails in the grime on his face. Steve always kept himself so neat, never shed a tear. Now, Tony barely recognises him.

 

"And maybe you find that hard to understand, Tony, because for such a long time, you've been homeless. Oh, sure, you've got a fancy house or three, but that's not a home. Home is where the people you love are. And I don't know if you love people or not, or if you know what I'm talking about, because you're always so goddamn quiet about everything that matters, and so damn loud about the things that don't. You keep your feelings in a cage, Tony, and you're going to kill them entirely. I know you don't trust me, and I know I'm so far from perfect, but so are you, and goddamn, Tony, I love you. And for a year, being with you, well… it felt like being home again. And now it's gone, and you've cut me out of your life, and I'm lost again. I just want to come home - it's all I want - but there will never, ever be a home for me again." Steve is still crying, silent tears cascading from red-rimmed eyes. He looks Tony in the eye, and Tony, hesitantly, meets his gaze, face unreadable.

 

Steve swallows awkwardly. "I'm not asking for what we had before. I know you can't give me that. But please don't shut me out. I need you."

 

Tony's eyes are wet, and as he blinks, a single tear drops from his eyelashes to his cheek, the first he has shed in many years. The light catches it, and Steve's eyes are drawn to it, questioning. Tony feels as though he is standing on the precipice of some great cliff, wind roaring, poised on the balls of his feet at its very edge. There is too much to churn through at once, this assault of emotion, all the hurt and the fights and the lying and the stealing and the blaming and the sadness and that final fight that had extinguished their hope like a snuffed candle, but all of this seems a long way off now, a hundred feet away, because Steve is here before him, hopeful and hopeless and sad and lonely and Steve needs him. And Tony, loathe as he is to admit it even to himself, needs Steve.

 

Tony takes a tentative step forward, bridging the gap between them, and Steve sniffs and wipes his nose on his sleeve, face slightly pink and blotchy, and Tony feels absolutely gutted.

 

"Steve, I -" he begins, and then stops, swallowing hard. This isn't a good decision, his mind tells him. You haven't thought this through, considered the variables. This isn't a good decision.

 

And maybe it's not a good decision. But hell, Tony decides, it is his decision, because while it may not be good, it is the right one. He has never felt so certain of anything in his life.

 

"I'm sorry."

 

There is a silence that spans an age, and then Steve is looking at him again, dull-eyed. "You're what?"

 

"I'm sorry." Tony has apologised more in one night than perhaps he has in the past year. Steve's eyes are blank, confused, searching, but somewhere deep within them, Tony can see that tiny spark of hope.

 

"What for?" Steve's voice is quiet, cautious. His face is tense, as though he's waiting for a punch he can't defend against to be thrown.

 

Tony's throat is dry. "For leaving," he says slowly, each word a separate aeon, spanning only seconds but feeling like millennia.

 

"For not loving you like I should have. For abandoning you when you needed me." The words are coming faster now, in fits and bursts, unchained emotion brimming over into cascades of words he has not been able to speak for a long time.

 

"For being a dick. For being argumentative and difficult to work with. For stealing your things. For not talking to you for days at a time because I'm wrapped up in some stupid project that could have waited. For undermining your authority. For telling you I hated you. For everything that I ever did to hurt you." He draws a deep breath, heart pounding a tremulous tattoo against the arc reactor's cool circle.

 

"Steve, I love you. I never stopped loving you. I just lost it, somewhere, along the way. I'm not good at emotions. Never have been. But I do love you, and I'm sorry."

 

Steve is crying again, and Tony isn't sure, but he's hoping that these are the good kind of tears, the ones that come when you're brimming with hope and not irreparable brokenness. Tony hopes fervently that it is not too late, that his apology has come soon enough, that he has not lost his home within moments of realising it. In those moments of in-between, as he waits for Steve to respond, he is assaulted with his own agony, at his stupid decisions, at his idiocy, at his petulance - at his need to push anyone and everyone who has ever loved him away.

 

It only takes a moment.

 

"You… you really mean that?" Steve's voice is tentative, hopeful, cautious.

 

Tony nods, searching Steve's face for a sign that not all is lost. "I do. I really do. I - mmphh!"

 

And then Steve's lips are crushed against his, stopping his words, all hopeful and passionate and happy and sad and hurt and healing and loving, and Tony is kissing him back, eyes closed in quiet ecstasy, running his hands through Steve's filthy hair and not caring, just holding him tightly, because it is Steve, and something broken inside of Tony is slowly mending, and he realises his idiocy, to think that Steve was the root of all of his problems. Steve is the solution. The problem was his absence.

 

Strong arms wind around Tony's waist, clasping behind the small of his back, and though there is still a long way to go, he knows things will be okay. Because he is with Steve, and Steve is with him, and that is all they need. All they ever needed. He was a fool not to realise it.

 

When they draw apart, tears mingled on each other's cheeks, and they have cried and embraced and cried until they are wrung dry, they sit down on the steps together and watch the dawn unfold, rose-tinted gold lacing the tops of tall buildings and silhouetting them against a dove-grey sky. Tony lays his head on Steve's shoulder, and Steve laces an arm around Tony's waist, and there they sit, staring into the silence.

 

"You were wrong, you know," Tony says quietly, after a little while, and Steve looks down at him, startled and confused, not sure what he means by this comment, so soon. Tony feels a twinge of panic at Steve's doubt, and hastily clarifies. "About me being homeless, I meant," he said, and feels Steve relax against him. "I mean, I have been for years, but I have a home. I've had it for a while." He takes a deep breath. "You're my home, Steve. I've only just now realised it." He falls silent, staring into the dawn-painted sky. "Being a genius really is overrated. Any fool could have seen that, could have known all along."

 

Steve draws him close, hugging him hard, and Tony winds his arms into the embrace and holds Steve as hard as he can, as though he will never let go. Steve is fighting the tears that threaten to return, and he buries his face in Tony's hair as Tony nestles against him. They sit there on the steps and hold each other tight until the sun comes up, and for the first time, in what feels like an eternity, the world feels a little bit right. After the longest of absences, they have made it. They are home. 

**Author's Note:**

> As always, feedback of any kind is welcomed, including constructive criticism. Thanks for reading.


End file.
